Steve Schmidt, Republican strategist, talks with Steve Kornacki about the awkward position Republicans are in having lionized Bill and Hillary Clinton to make President Obama look bad only to have to tear her down again as they look ahead to 2016.

Too bad all the Republicans know how to do is tear down. The American people deserve to be lifted up especially since it was the Republicans and their ReaganRand policies that crashed the economy and created all the messes in the first place.

Typical. That is what Joe Scarborough did in 2008 and why I stopped watching him and haven’t looked back since. When he thought PBO did not stand a chance in beating Hillary, he demonized Hillary every single day. Back then Pat Buchanan used to appear on the show. After PBO won Iowa, I began to notice a shift. It was constant negativity to PBO. And based on what I see in my TL, he has not let up.

How sad these pathetic excuses for human beings are, LH. They’re paid huge sums to strategize and don’t think two steps ahead of themselves. An kid in middle school could have told them they were backing themselves into a corner.

Good morning. Got so caught up in last night’s comments, I missed the open door. NYC’s DeBlazio is showing New Yorkers why big things get done when you elect a Progressive. He’s planning the most ambitious new housing program in decades that will reach out into the boroughs and include affordable homes and housing for the homeless. Instead of more gentrification which caters to the well-to-do and displaces everyone else, his vision is inclusive.

Scarborough: Obama ‘Should Have Known’ GOP Was Radicalized When He Ran

——————————————

Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough said Tuesday morning that President Barack Obama “should have known” that he would have to deal with a “more radicalized” Republican Party from the moment he ran, and faulted Obama for not learning from the example of former President Bill Clinton — called it — even as his fellow panelists looked at him as if he were bonkers.

Scarborough’s remarks came after New Yorker editor David Remnick said that Obama has had to deal with a “more radicalized” GOP than even Clinton did.

So the onus is on the President to be more triangulating or some such nonsense because the party of personal responsibility can’t take responsibility for even being civil? Yup, that makes sense if you are a ridiculously twisted person. Also, I have to say that I don’t think the President assumed cooperation or even civility but it was his way of trying to restore a broken system while also making it obvious for everyone but the media hacks that he is the mature,responsible person who puts people first and contrasts his behavior with the immature, disrespectful, obstructionist GOP who have been willing to sacrifice the economy and ordinary people in their attempts to gain power.

Please tell me how was POTUS to know that he would have to deal with a bunch of crazy ass racists Republicans. Maybe POTUS thought that with the country in such a bad state, thanks to G.W. Bush, and lots of those Republicans, there would be some there willing to work with him , to put the welfare of the country first. But POTUS learn how wrong he was if he thought that way. The entire Republican Party are a bunch of extreme radical right wing racists.

Number one he did know it. The man was in Congress so he knows how they think. Number two a right wing Republican who once voted to impeach a Democratic President knows what radicalized means first hand. This is par for the course with Scarborough. He may have shown flashes of sanity during the Bush years but he’s been all in since PBO took office.

When the best you can do is say The President should have known how crazy Republicans are then you’ve lost the game. Scarborough’s statemet tells me PBO is beating him and his party like it’s practice.

I think President Obama was very well aware of the status of the republican party. What he hadn’t foreseen is that the republicans would offer NO cooperation EVEN IN THE FACE OF A HUGE CRISIS. He honestly thought that because the situation was so dire, even a radicalized republican party would be able to put country before party. President Obama didn’t think that republicans would go THAT FAR in their IMMORAL behavior. And the president surely was surprised that the republicans didn’t pay a political price for this. He acknowledged this a few times.

Another thing he didn’t know is that the media would PERSIST in the false equivalencies. He honestly thought that as the GOP became more irrational, obstructive, the media WOULDN’T HAVE ANY CHOICE but say the obvious: both parties were NOT the same anymore.

The courage he has had in the face of such immorality, shallowness in the GOP, the whole Beltway culture, the whole media culture…

Barack Obama is a man of profound integrity, and the past five years must have been tough for his heart and his soul. What keeps him going is his profound love for America and its people. What keeps him going is when he meets ordinary americans, who have their hearts in the right place and haven’t had their soul “polluted” by the cynicism, the self-serving attitude that prevails in Washington D.C. What also keeps him going is his staff, and the numerous great public servants he’s working with within the administrative apparatus. They are working in the real world, and are not interested in mirages or in “spin”. And they’re doing a magnificent job, many of it completely under the radar. This administration is the best in decades….

Good morning, TOD family! Positive start with this strong photo of a good person on task to do good work for all. PBO moving Forward! We just voted! Got our stickers and put 2 votes in for Judge Robin Hudson, NC Supreme Court Justice under massive attack in “nonpartisan” reelection bid. Expecting the best…

Good day to everyone in the village! This is my lazing-around-pretending-I-took-a-couple-days-to-do-my-tax day. The sun is shining. I’m as relaxed as it’s possible to be with 5 hours sleep. Let’s roll out the party! ….Oops, I better go eat before I start. Have a great day!

Since 2006 when Massachusets got healthcare death rates have dropped Significantly. That is news.
Since President Obama took office our national deficit has been cut in 1/2. That is news.
Our unemployment rate now is at 6.3. That is news.
In the last 3 months close to 700,000 jobs have been added to our economy. That is news.
ACA? Millions and growing.
At this point in his presidency GWB’s approval was at 33%. POTUS’ is at 45%. I guess that is news, also.

I just read Charles Blow’s comment on the last thread and it says it all.

There are negative forces in our country that want us broken weak and obedient.
Most important they want us not to vote.

So they focus on the Clintons and celebrities. With the enthusiastic cooperation of the greatest attention-grabbing duo the world has ever seen.
And report only bad news for PBO.

Our best defense is our GOTV efforts.

I realize I’m saying nothing new here, but it seems more and more absurd to me that as the good news grows so does the bogus polling and the hate. And the screaming pregnancy headlines. The mind boggles—what comes next?

Vicki, if Americans heard and understood even a fraction of that good news, they would be shocked at how much is being kept from them. People have docilely accepted their mushroom status, toiling in the dark and not understanding anything that happens around them. If they think that nothing gets better and there’s nothing they can do about it, they become willing tools in the GOP game of suppressing the vote. If they made an effort to vote for President Obama and the media repeatedly tells them he’s a failure, then the reaction, is “why bother, they’re all the same.” And the GOP scores the goal.

Yes jackie and yardarm and what I forgot to mention is that in the absence of bad POTUS news the media and GOP LIE and make up bad news. The Paul Krugman article in yesterdays R & S was very good on this point.

The incident with the newspaper occurred late last month. Willamette Week determines its political endorsements a little differently than other newspapers around the country. Instead of interviewing candidates individually, the paper brings candidates for each particular office in as a group to talk to its editors and reporters.

On April 21, Mark Callahan — a guy who has previously run for office as a Democrat and Pacific Green Party member, who has run for President, who now bills himself as “cut from the same cloth” as Ted Cruz and Rand Paul, and who has raised just $21,000 for his campaign — joined a group of four other Republicans competing in the state’s Senate primary for an endorsement interview with the newspaper.

The whole thing stretched an hour and a half, but Callahan didn’t make it to the end. He got in a fight with the Willamette Week’s staff and was asked to leave.

Aside from the no-freedom angle, Putin is clearly one of those leaders with no long view – trying to make some quick money. Probably thinks this will help his cash flow. Seems like his ‘parliament’ makes laws to suit his whims as they arise. :roll:

Harf said that Kerry “has been made aware” of the subpoena, but still plans to be out of the country and in Mexico on the 21st. She said the State Department was “surprised” that Darrell Issa skipped over offering an invitation and went straight to issuing a subpoena. She very strongly intimated the subpoena was issued for partisan political purposes and suggested Republicans are hypocrites for decrying subpoenas when they were issued against Condoleezza Rice.

When repeatedly pressed about the subpoena, Harf said the State Department would work something out with the House.

“We are committed to working with the committee to find a resolution to this that is acceptable to both sides. We were surprised when they didn’t reach out to us before issuing a subpoena for exactly that reason. And as I’ve noted here, there have been a number of Republicans who themselves, under the previous administration, said a Secretary of State should not be subpoenaed.”

No reason SOS Kerry should have to comply with this political subpoena! In fact, I read somewhere yesterday, of course can’t remember where, that one of the methods Bush and cronies used was to ignore subpoenas. This way they were never seen being grilled by the committee members. Good for SOS Kerry. This was not during his tenure anyway.

Df, you have to have a state government that cares who dies in their state and none of these do, except for the new governor in VA. In Pennsylvania, the current governor and legislature wouldn’t see the problem with all those deaths, as long as they get their regular paychecks from the Koch brothers. This is another reason why 2014 is so crucial.

And there you have the REAL reason why republicans in Congress absolutely LOATHE Eric Holder and have tried to destroy him since the beginning. Orders are coming from high up. Wall Street wants him OUT. Mr. Holder has sustained all the abuse, but it has taken a toll on his health. I’ve always been worried he might get really sick from exhaustion and stress.

Congress holding Eric Holder in contempt, last year, was one of the most DISGRACEFUL acts we’ve seen in american politics in quite some time.

Since January, the President has taken more than 20 actions to help build real, lasting economic security for the middle class and expand opportunities for every hardworking American to get ahead. http://www.wh.gov/year-of-action

If you compare the costs of the Reagan Administration’s serial security lapses in Beirut to the costs of Benghazi, it’s clear what has really deteriorated in the intervening three decades. It’s not the security of American government personnel working abroad. It’s the behavior of American congressmen at home.

John Podesta said when he took the job that he would NOT be involved in any of Keystone discussions because his position on it is well known. He was on today to discuss the Climate Change report and Chucky kept asking him if he was ” lobbying ” the President over Keystone….

Podesta finally said to him ” Why do you keep using that word, when I have already said I am not involved.” He also said “PBO is well aware of my position on Keystone. “

Must be that they know President Obama won’t approve it, and the Kochs, lobbyists behind the scenes have started to push back. Either they want to intimidate the president into saying yes, or they want congressional democrats to put pressure on the president, and/or they want democrats and the president to pay a big political price for refusing the pipeline.

Watch for all the media lapdogs to get in the bandwagon. Keystone, keystone, keystone !

O’BRIEN: Is it true that you voted to cut the funding for embassy security?

CHAFFETZ: Absolutely. Look, we have to make priorities and choices in this country. We have — think about this — 15,000 contractors in Iraq. We have more than 6,000 contractors, private army there for President Obama in Baghdad.

And we’re talking about can we get two dozen or so people into Libya to help protect our forces? When you’re in tough economic times, you have to make difficult choices how to prioritize this.

They know Americans don’t remember/know about this….they should be made to answer and lay this out in front of America to see. They are despicable liars. They need to be made to answer….wait, who’s supposed to do that? The incompetent MSM? THAT’S why they get away with this bullshit all the time….BECAUSE THEY CAN!

Absolutely. The president isn’t weak. He doesn’t have a messaging problem. The fundamental problem in American isn’t even the republican party. It’s the national media who has completely abdicated its role of informing people and calling out the lies and distortions.

In the absence of referees, the liars and demagogues are at a big advantage.

Similarly, the collective freak-out about ObamaCare and its characterization as some exotic un-American socialist scheme, was perceived by blacks as a barely-veiled racist attack both on the president and on their community.

The decision by Mitch McConnell and other party leaders to oppose Obama’s entire agenda before he even was sworn into office was seen by blacks as a totally unprecedented lack of respect that had never been done to any other president.

The decision to pursue widespread voter ID laws that disproportionately disenfranchise blacks was so toxic that it actually led to higher black turnout in the 2012 election than white turnout, for the first time ever. Following that up with the Supreme Court’s decision to gut the Voting Rights Act is like setting a nuclear bomb off. Attacks on Affirmative Action only exacerbate an already explosive opposition to the GOP in the black community. Holding Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt is another thumb in the eye.

The refusal to allow a vote on immigration reform in the House is infuriating Latinos.

Meanwhile, the right-wing media machine has been giving whites a steady diet of racial grievance. This has succeeded in driving up support for the GOP among whites, but the cost is an ever-increasing erosion of support among anyone of color.
…………………………..//

American demographics are changing, the whites will lose their majority in a not so distant future. This will create/is already creating some tensions. And it looks like the republican party is becoming the political instrument of white insecurity and resentment, and worse even, white supremacy. Even at the level of SCOTUS, the actions clearly demonstrate that republicans will do everything in their power, consciously or unconsciously, to preserve white privilege.

History has taught us that very rarely a majority losing its status accepts it peacefully. We’re already seeing numerous signs that in America, history will repeat itself.

HUGE sigh—-Whoopi Goldberg just defended Condi Rice and apparently the lies about the Iraq War and said who she would like to protest are the teachers at Rutgers who didn’t approve of an Iraq War promoter as their commencement speaker. Just irresponsible, non-thinking commentary.

The Senate will hold a members-only briefing on Ukraine at 5:30 P.M. ET on Tuesday, Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) announced in the morning.

“There will be a members-only briefing, a closed briefing tonight at 5:30 regarding Ukraine,” he said on the Senate floor. “I would hope everyone would come to that. There’s some things going on in Ukraine we should all know about.”